The vibe in HR offices right now is... tense. Honestly, if you’ve spent five minutes looking at learning and development news lately, you know the headlines are basically screaming. AI is here. Skills are expiring. The "AI divide" is widening.
But here’s the thing. Most people are focusing on the wrong stuff.
They’re obsessed with which LLM to buy or how many thousands of courses are in their library. Meanwhile, the actual news—the stuff that determines if your team stays or jumps ship—is happening in the cracks. It’s about "learning debt," agentic AI "cheating," and the fact that most managers are currently drowning.
The Rise of Agentic AI (And the Death of Completion Rates)
For decades, L&D was a game of "check the box." Did they finish the module? Great. 100% completion. Give the team a high five.
Well, that's dead.
One of the wildest bits of learning and development news this year is the rise of agentic AI. These aren't just chatbots; they’re agents that can act on behalf of a user. In some companies, employees are literally using AI agents to "breeze through" compliance training. The bot watches the video, takes the quiz, and gets the certificate.
On paper? The L&D department looks like a hero. In reality? Nobody learned a thing.
This is forcing a massive pivot toward "proof of readiness." Experts like Rashid at HRMorning are pointing out that if AI can fake it, the training is probably useless anyway. We’re seeing a shift toward "un-fakable" learning: live role-plays, interactive simulations, and monitoring downstream metrics like "deal cycle time" or "coding accuracy" instead of just "clicks."
The "Learning Debt" Crisis
Work is moving faster than people can learn. It’s that simple.
There’s this term floating around called "learning debt." Think of it like technical debt. Every time a company rolls out a new software or changes a process without giving people the actual headspace to master it, that debt grows.
According to recent reports from TalentLMS, about 53% of employees say their workload is so high they don't have time to train, even when they know they need it. It's a "permanent sprint."
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We’re seeing a lot of news about "learning in the flow of work," which basically means putting the training inside the tools people already use. Think Miro, Notion, or Slack nudges. If you have to leave your work to go "learn," you probably won't do it.
Why Leadership Development is Actually Failing
Everyone says leadership is the #1 priority. It has been for years. Yet, if you look at the data from Together Platform, organizations are still failing at it.
Why? Because leadership is being treated like a topic, not a practice.
The move in 2026 is away from "episodic" training—those three-day off-sites that everyone forgets by Monday—and toward "continuous journeys." We’re talking about mixing live coaching with AI-powered reflection.
Josh Bersin is calling 2026 the year of "Enterprise AI," but he’s also hammering home the idea of the "Superworker." This isn't someone who just knows how to prompt a bot. It’s someone with "adaptive skills"—curiosity, resilience, and systems thinking. These are the human-centric skills that AI can't replicate, and they’re becoming the most valuable currency in the business world.
The End of the Content Library
Remember when having a "library of 10,000 courses" was a flex?
Those days are over.
Degreed and other platforms are reporting a "navigation crisis." Employees are drowning in options. The news here is that libraries are becoming "ingredients" rather than destinations. Instead of telling an employee to "go find a course on Excel," AI is now assembling personalized pathways on the fly.
The goal is to answer the "Tuesday at 10:15 a.m. question." What does this person need to know right now to finish the task in front of them?
How to Actually Navigate This (Actionable Insights)
If you're trying to keep up with learning and development news without losing your mind, here is how you actually move the needle this year:
- Stop tracking completion. It’s a vanity metric. Start looking at "Time to Proficiency." How long does it take for a new hire to actually do the job well?
- Audit your "Learning Debt." Talk to your team. If they say they’re too busy to learn, you don’t have a training problem; you have a capacity problem. Something has to come off the plate.
- Focus on "AI Fluency," not just "AI Tools." Don't just teach people how to use a specific bot. Teach them how to think with AI. This includes ethics, bias detection, and knowing when the AI is hallucinating.
- Nurture the "Human Dividend." As technical tasks get automated, the "soft" stuff becomes the "hard" stuff. Empathy, conflict resolution, and strategic thinking are where the ROI is hiding.
- Kill before you create. For every new training program you launch, retire an old one. Keep your ecosystem lean.
L&D isn't just about "teaching" anymore. It’s about "performance enablement." The companies that win in 2026 won't be the ones with the flashiest tech—they'll be the ones that actually give their people the space to grow.
Basically, stop looking at the tools and start looking at the humans.
Next Steps for You:
- Audit your current metrics: Identify one "vanity metric" (like total login hours) and replace it with a "performance metric" (like reduction in error rates post-training).
- Implement a "Reflection Ritual": Use an AI tool or a simple manager check-in to ask employees what they learned this week and how they applied it.
- Review your content library: Identify the top 10% of resources that actually get used and consider "sunsetting" the bottom 30% to reduce choice fatigue.